The area hydrography shapefile contains the geometry and attributes of both perennial and intermittent area hydrography features, including ponds, lakes, oceans, swamps, glaciers, and the area covered by large streams represented as double-line drainage. Single-line drainage water features can be found in the All Lines Shapefile and Linear Hydrography Shapefile.
The artificial path features may correspond to those in the USGS National Hydrographic Dataset (NHD). However, in many cases the features do not match NHD equivalent feature and will not carry the NHD metadata codes.
Single-line drainage water features include artificial path features that run through double-line drainage features such as rivers and streams, and serve as a linear representation of these features. Shorelines for area hydrography can be found in the All Lines shapefiles with MTFCC set to either “P0002” (shoreline of perennial water feature) or “P0003” (shoreline of intermittent water feature).
| Hydrography (Area) Shapefile Record Layout | |||
| tl_year_[state-county FIPS]_areawater.shp | |||
| Field | Length | Type | Description |
| ANSICODE | 8 | String | Official code for the water body for use by federal agencies for data transfer and dissemination, if applicable |
| HYDROID | 22 | String | Area hydrography identifier |
| FULLNAME | 100 | String | Concatenation of expanded text for prefix qualifier, prefix direction, prefix type, base name, suffix type, suffix direction, and suffix qualifier (as available) with a space between each expanded text field |
| MTFCC | 5 | String | MAF/TIGER feature class code |
| ALAND | 14 | Number | Land area |
| AWATER | 14 | Number | Water area |
| INTPTLAT | 11 | String | Latitude of the internal point |
| INTPTLON | 12 | String | Longitude of the internal point |